The Longest Day 1962
I had always heard of this movie about the D Day invasion, but had never seen it. With some of these old war movies, you don't know what to expect. This one uses the interesting idea of showing D Day from American, British, and German perspectives. The German perspective is mostly of the general staff in occupied France making mistakes and guessing wrong about what was happening. They are telling a big story by telling a number of small stories. They don't spend a lot of time going over strategies (the Germans do most of that). There is only one scene with Eisenhower. There is also a huge cast, with a lot of stars that are fun to watch and I still missed a lot of them. It is kind of like a buffet of World War II scenes, mostly light and much more bloodless than anything more modern. The approach doesn't work that well in telling a story, but it does make for easy watching. Most stories only last a few minutes and you are on to something else. Of course the good guys win in the end despite a lot of missteps and losses. Some of the fighting scenes are very impressive with hundreds and in one beach scene, thousands of troops shown in one long overhead shot. There are also a lot of fake looking scenes where actors are in front of a projected background unfortunately. Overall it is still impressive and the pinnacle of producer Darryl Zanuck's career at Fox. The digital copy has some nice bonus materials including two commentary tracks (which I did not watch) and a couple of documentaries about making the movie that were very interesting. Too often the digital copies only include the movie and maybe the trailer.
Written: 27 Mar 2024
Owned on: Digital